


The Dangers of Reminiscing

by kribban



Category: Back to the Future (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-08
Updated: 2015-11-08
Packaged: 2018-04-30 16:51:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5171891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kribban/pseuds/kribban
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Looking back at something that may or may not yet happen is not the sanest course of action.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dangers of Reminiscing

**Author's Note:**

> Written in January 2006.

When Marty calms down enough to begin to hope that he will actually fall asleep, he realises three very disturbing things. 

The first is the fact that his mother groped him. He figures he’s going to need about a thousand therapy sessions to get over that incident. 

The second thing he realises is that he will probably be stuck living out his youth in a world without MTV and decent music. Thank God he has his walkman with him. It took him a month of packing bags at the grocery store to raise the hundred and twenty bucks it cost. It doesn’t make him feel any better to know that if he loses it, he’ll have to wait twenty five years for it to be invented.

The third and most disturbing realisation is something he hasn’t thought twice about until this very moment. He has spent the last three and a half months dealing with the sort of relaxed awkwardness that only sex can bring, and had gotten so used to it that it didn’t occur to him that this thirty years younger version of his dead best friend has no clue they’ve gone to first, second, third and home base together. 

Maybe there is a good way to tell someone you’re going to go all the way with them in twenty nine and a half years, but if there is, he hasn’t watched enough of Phil Donahue to know about it. So he’s glad he told Doc about Jennifer instead, because she’s the one he’s with now, and he loves her more than to dwell on a rushed one night stand on his seventeenth birthday.

From this point of view it hasn’t even happened yet. Perhaps now, it never will.

The fact that his history is now unwritten becomes disturbingly clear to him once he has seen Dave’s head erased in his wallet photograph. He hadn’t thought twice about knocking on Doc’s door when he’d arrived, but now he can’t help but wonder if this initial encounter will affect their relationship in the Eighties. Will Doc act differently towards him having full knowledge of their prospective friendship and time travel? Will knowing the future make him less inclined to fulfil the events on Marty’s birthday?

He lets the thought plague him because it’s easier to worry about his future sexual history than whether or not he will be erased from existence by Saturday.

If he grows up and it doesn’t happen, will he still be able to remember it? If it doesn’t happen and he doesn’t remember it, will the Fifties version of him be re-programmed to not be having these thoughts? And more importantly; will the sex still count?

The prospect of reducing his résumé by half is not very appealing.

He’s a hormonal teenager and the sensory memories have been imprinted in him like tattoos. The heaviness and the headiness of it all, the taste of sweat and come, how he’d pulled his knee in such a strange angle it took him days to work out the kinks, the feeling of elation that my god, he was like a star in a porno movie… He’s seventeen and not supposed to dwell on past conquests but he can’t help but jack off to the memories.

Despite what he had ensured Doc time and time again, he had never gone that far before and he couldn’t quite get used to the feeling of hands on his cock that weren’t his own. He hadn’t expected the first words out of his friend’s mouth to be an apology.

In the mornings before getting dressed, this younger, not-yet-dead version of Doc walks around in hideously long undergarments to hide the scar Marty knows is there. He bites his tongue to keep himself from blurting out that he’s already seen it up close.

He tries his best not to think about the back story of that scar which involves the femoral artery and a nuclear test site, so he thinks about the circumstances when he saw it and the feel of Doc’s thigh under his tongue.

Over the following week he focuses all his attention on getting his parents together. His father is unbelievably spineless and uncharismatic, and his mother’s a barely contained power keg of hormonal lust. He doesn’t know which is more disturbing. 

On Thursday, the unimaginable happens and his batteries run out. From his tech class he remembers that 1,5 V batteries probably exist by now, and if he gets stuck here he might get Doc to re-wire his walkman for him.

That is, of course, if he isn’t erased from existence by then. 

He jerks off to get his mind off it. He has a standard selection of images he uses to gets him hard; Jenn sticking her tongue in his ear, Madonna in her boy toy get up, Richard Gere taking his clothes off in American Gigolo. Being in a band, Marty has no hang-ups when it comes to these sorts of things. Lust is just lust, and words like ‘queer’ and ‘bisexual’ mean nothing to him. 

Inevitably his mind wanders to his own real-life initiation, the tastes and sounds of it all, the throbbing in his leg as it was over. He had still been dizzy from his orgasm as Doc had sat next to him on the couch and given him the gentlest kiss-off imaginable. 

This is all wrong. He should be out under the stars getting laid by Jenn now, not jacking off to a fuck that didn’t mean anything. 

He’d feel better if he weren’t alone with the memories, but he figures this is one of those things Doc would prefer to learn through the natural course of time. In any case, his friend’s untimely death seems to be more important to communicate. So despite his doubts, he doesn’t say a word about the future history of their relationship. Whether this course of action will ensure that history stays on track or will prevent the event from happening, he has no idea. In either case, it’s out of his hands and when he hugs his friend harder than ever before, he is, despite the hope kindled by the letter in Doc’s coat, truly saying goodbye.

He knows that his strategy worked thirty years later, as he’s sitting in the DeLorean with a very much alive Doc who touches his hand with the same reverent hesitancy he has done ever since that night Marty pushed him into the couch cushions. 

He is eager to talk about their time together in the Fifties. Marty doesn’t blame him. After all, he has waited thirty years to do so. But the ride from Lone Pine Mall is short (it will take him months to realise the meaning of the name change) and he decides to brave embarrassment and ask for details. 

He learns that most of it seems to have happened in the same way. He had showed up, moody and affectionate, some time after eating his cake and opening his presents. Marty doesn’t ask, but figures he had gotten the same junk as always; sweatshirts from Lorraine and crappy magazine subscriptions from George. Why on earth would a kid be interested in Reference Quarterly? 

Apparently, he’d been the one to make the first move in this reality, too, taking off his shirt and spreading out over the couch because it was larger and the bed seemed too intimate somehow. 

From what he’s hearing, he seems to have been met with more enthusiasm in this reality than in his own. Christ, he had had to beg for it, rationalising it to Doc as a thing all kids do and exaggerating his own experiences. Maybe that makes him a slut, but he’d just needed to feel close to someone who wasn’t emotionally distant, even if it was only for a few moments. 

But in this version of events, he doesn’t seem to have had to beg very hard at all, and he can’t help but feel a thrill at the possibility that things might have turned out differently. 

But they haven’t, and he’s listening to Doc recounting the same old story between coughs and comments about trying to protect the timeline. Marty reckons he must feel embarrassed.

“I do care very deeply for you, Marty,” he stutters, and Marty knows. After all, he’s been through this once before.

They never mention it again. It is after all only a minor detail compared to time travel and paradoxes and saving the universe from destruction.

When the Western Union-delivered letter leads Marty back into the arms of the unknowing, undergarment-wearing man his other self has just finished saying goodbye to, he has enough experience with ripple effects to not be tempted to divulge any information. Before the weekend is over, Doc is married with children and living happily ever after in another century. 

They are true friends, best friends who don’t let thoughtless mistakes affect their friendship. It’s in a past that has long since been forgotten and Marty has a brilliant future that awaits him. It has been re-made twice, after all. When he’ll recall his youth, many years down the line, it will be the adventure of time travel he’ll remember and the part in history that he has played. 

But sometimes when he’s giving his new and improved mother a hug, or when he’s tuning his guitar the minutes before his cue, or when he lifts Marty Jr. up and tells himself he won’t let him down this time, the dangers of reminiscing are forgotten and he remembers, not the trips with the DeLorean, or the three years of assisting failed science experiments, or the periodic visits over the last twenty years, but that sweaty, insignificant night on the couch in Doc’s garage.

He remembers, and somehow, it makes him feel lonely.


End file.
